Economies of Writing: Revaluations in Rhetoric and Composition
317
Economies of Writing: Revaluations in Rhetoric and Composition
317eBook
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Overview
Economies of Writing advances scholarship on political economies of writing and writing instruction, considering them in terms of course subject, pedagogy, technology, and social practice. Taking the "economic" as a necessary point of departure and contention for the field, the collection insists that writing concerns are inevitably participants in political markets in their consideration of forms of valuation, production, and circulation of knowledge with labor and with capital.
Approaching the economic as plural, contingent, and political, chapters explore complex forces shaping the production and valuation of literacies, languages, identities, and institutions and consider their implications for composition scholarship, teaching, administration, and public rhetorics. Chapters engage a range of issues, including knowledge transfer, cyberpublics, graduate writing courses, and internationalized web domains.
Economies of Writing challenges dominant ideologies of writing, writing skills, writing assessment, language, writing technology, and public rhetoric by revealing the complex and shifting valuations of writing practices as they circulate within and across different economies. The volume is a significant contribution to rhetoric and composition’s understanding of and ways to address its seemingly perennial unease about its own work.
Contributors: Anis Bawarshi, Deborah Brandt, Jenn Fishman, T. R. Johnson, Jay Jordan, Kacie Kiser, Steve Lamos, Donna LeCourt, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, Samantha Looker, Katie Malcolm, Paul Kei Matsuda, Joan Mullin, Jason Peters, Christian J. Pulver, Kelly Ritter, Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Tony Scott, Scott Wible, Yuching Jill Yang, James T. Zebroski
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607325239 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 317 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Bruce Horner is Endowed Chair in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville. His books include Cross-Language Relations in Composition, winner of the 2012 CCCC Outstanding Book Award; Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition; and Rewriting Composition.
Brice Nordquist is assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University. He is the chair of the CCCC’s Transnational Composition Group and assistant editor of Working Papers on Negotiating Differences in Language and Literacy.
Susan M. Ryan is associate professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she specializes in American literature and culture. She is the author of The Grammar of Good Intentions and The Moral Economies of American Authorship.
Read an Excerpt
Economies of Writing
Revaluations in Rhetoric and Composition
By Bruce Horner, Brice Nordquist, Susan M. Ryan
University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2017 University Press of ColoradoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-523-9
CHAPTER 1
THE POLITICS OF VALUATION IN WRITING ASSESSMENT
Tony Scott
Two contrasting situations have become familiar tropes of writing program administration and writing assessment scholarship in our field. Chris Gallagher (2009, 29–30) opens an article about assessment in Writing Program Administration with the description of one scenario in which university administrators are seeking to impose standardized assessments on a first-year writing program. The administrators are tying assessment to efficiency, centralized quality control, and accountability. Looming ominously within the scene is the Spellings Commission Report, which uses crisis rhetoric to call for an overhaul of higher education that has efficiency and accountability (typically code for mandated large-scale assessment) as central elements; also looming is the testing/textbook/curriculum industry, which has become an important, politically active driver of state-imposed assessment mandates on higher education across the country. After presenting this daunting scenario, Gallagher offers a contrasting scenario in which the writing program administrator (WPA) is respected and placed in a position of agency. The empowered WPA in the more positive scenario is recognized by interdisciplinary colleagues and higher-level administrators for expertise in writing, and she is initiating informed, democratic assessment practices with teachers that have positive effects in classes across campus (30).
Cindy Moore, Peggy O'Neill, and Brian Huot open an influential article in College Composition and Communication with similarly contrasting situations. In the first, a dean initiates contact with a WPA to seek advice about assessment in a writing-across-the-curriculum initiative. Moore, O'Neill, and Huot (2009) see this as an important development for its "implied message about the potential role of the composition director in the broad-based assessment this dean is beginning to imagine" (108). As with Gallagher's more positive scenario, here the WPA is in a position of power that comes from institutionally recognized expertise in both assessment and writing. She is not only able to shape how writing is conceived and assessed in the writing program, she is also able to shape assessment policy across campus. The article then describes contrasting, negative scenarios, which, the authors acknowledge, are common enough to have become established lore in the field. Here, assessments are imposed from outside, and WPAs are forced to work within narrow parameters that offer little autonomy for the writing program and little control over how scores will be used (108–9).
The problem posed in both articles is, How we might do assessment constructively, responsibly, and in a way consistent with current scholarly understandings of writers and writing, under circumstances not yet of our making? The responses to the problem are nearly always individualistic and focus primarily on the actions, rhetorical acumen, and agentive scope of the WPA, who represents the seemingly unified interests of an entire writing program. A minimum requirement is that the WPA learn about assessment. Moore, O'Neill, and Huot (2009) advocate a fairly deep and rigorous knowledge that includes understanding of complex conversations in psychometrics and educational measurement. Gallagher (2009) advocates a perhaps more familiarly composition-situated expertise that combines a current understanding of writing pedagogy with a general understanding of technical concepts in assessment. Both envision responses to assessment challenges that involve a rhetorically adept WPA who, lacking institutionally conferred agency and expertise in writing education, must create the conditions for it through the power of persuasion.
The trope of the can-do, rhetorically savvy, resourceful WPA holds its own place in the WPA scholarship. In her award-winning monograph, The Activist WPA, Linda Adler-Kassner (2008) offers frameworks WPAs might use to build relationships and coalitions across campuses and beyond to secure resources. While the techniques are drawn from activism, the purposes to which they are put are hardly radical — to create the conditions for a responsible and effective writing program. Kelly Ritter (2006, 61) similarly advocates that WPAs go public, outside of institutional structures, to gain a "hard-fought" authority not conferred institutionally and to secure seemingly basic operational resources. She advocates negotiating and building consensus with a broad swath of people — upper-level university administrators, regional WPAs, trustees on the school board, feeder institutions, high schools, and state boards of higher education. All of this work is to happen, one imagines, in addition to the demanding day-to-day work of actually administering a writing program.
What are the conditions that have led WPAs to envision this superbly skilled, tireless, and self-sacrificing professional paragon whose primary goal is to overcome considerable institutional friction — only to responsibly do what the institution mandates? How does the function of WPAs as skilled negotiators and assessment experts relate to the agency and conditions of the TAs and contracted part- and full-time non-tenure-track instructors who teach most writing classes? Why, when so many first-year writing programs aren't regularly resourced at minimally responsible levels and in a time of austerity in higher education, is there such a strong push at state and federal levels to mandate writing assessments? In this chapter, drawing on my experiences with designing and implementing program assessments as a WPA, I further examine the political economic implications of large-scale writing assessment and how it relates to management/labor dynamics in composition. Though technical expertise in assessment is certainly important, so too is critical understanding of the persistent political economic ordering functions of assessment. I argue that a vital but largely missing element of the assessment scene in the scholarship involves labor struggle, or how assessment functions as a means of misrepresenting and ordering the labor of teachers and students through controlling the terms of its valuation. The push to make writing labor (teaching and composing) a commodity, an exchangeable unit divorced from material situations and laboring bodies, extends from a neoliberal political economic ideology that seeks economization of all human relations according to a singular model of efficiency, competition, and concentrated accumulation. I argue that large-scale writing assessment mandates function as a means of making the terms of labor invisible through shifting the focus from the qualitative to the quantitative, from multiplicity to singularity, and from the agentive exercise of professional expertise to the ordered achievement of symbolic outcomes.
DIFFERENT REPRESENTATIONS, DIFFERENT ORDERS
In Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life, Allan Hanson (1993) argues that assessment is ubiquitous in contemporary Western life because it serves as a means of imposing order and discipline. Hanson describes practices as varied as medieval witch tests, drug tests, polygraph tests, and standardized achievement tests that help to maintain order through enforcing and clarifying culturally/politically sanctioned categories. Testing therefore serves to create boundaries, hierarchies, and representations according to the dominant assumptions of a time and place.
I offer another WPA assessment scenario drawn from my past experience, one I will describe with emphasis on how it represents and orders labor. As an accreditation review approached at a large, public university in the Southeast, a dean was placed in charge of assessment across all colleges and units. The university had an assessment officer who, in coordination with the dean, developed an interpretation of the requirements of the accreditation body. Based on that interpretation, a set of assessment guidelines and a reporting process were developed. As WPA, I was told to design and implement my own assessment of the writing program. However, we were required to use formalized procedures designed to respond to accreditation reporting guidelines, and all assessing units were required to report using the same form.
This requirement was important because the form was not philosophically neutral. It framed assessment in terms of deficit location and diagnosis at the programmatic level and it reflected an objectivist perspective on measurement (a copy of the reporting form is included in Appendix 1.A). The ordering "story" the form is designed to create is that
• We have deficits in teaching in the program occurring across classrooms.
• Those deficits can be identified and quantified through the reliable evaluation of students' texts, where they will manifest in aggregate.
• Those deficits can be remedied programmatically, and the results of the remedy should show in the next round of assessment. The program structure is such that this instrumental action is possible.
• What we value in student writing and how we value it is necessarily constant over time. If we don't maintain the same stated outcomes, and the same means of measuring those outcomes, there is no means of comparison between assessment years, no way of tracking progress or regression. So the assessment mandate also requires stasis. We must close the discussion of what we value and how we assess: in this endless growth model, the premium is on comparison and directed change over years.
• Assessment is positivistic and objective. Through sound measurement and adjustment, we will be able to make verifiable progress toward a defined notion of perfection in student performance (and yet perfection remains outside of what the reporting form allows programs to claim).
• Language use can be extracted from the messy varieties of everyday utterances (parole) and seen and measured as it relates to a targeted, context-transcendent system (langue).
• The program is organized in a way that enables it to be honed by the administrator to address deficits effectively. So the assumption is also that there is a stable and professional teaching cadre with adequate administrative support for emphasis and focus.
My colleagues and I recognized in the approval and reporting process the "accountability" rhetoric that has become a central platform of national educational policy and instrumental in establishing the pervasiveness of testing in K–12 education. Objectivist assessments align with a labor model that technocratizes teaching and writing, seeking to convert it to measurable, manageable units. The assessment mandate compelled us toward methods of assessment that countered our constructivist understanding of all acts of reading, writing, and learning as socially situated and our understanding that standards are ideologically contended and socially produced.
Our requests for funding to develop a qualitative assessment were turned down (we were only given enough funding to pay scorers during scoring sessions). Fortunately, in a competitive process we secured a program-development grant to conduct a constructivist assessment with substantial qualitative elements that built on the dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) model developed by Bob Broad (2003). This model seeks to include teachers in every phase of the assessment, including the development of the assessment standards. While it generated aggregate numbers to satisfy the institutional requirement, the model was designed to be primarily descriptive rather than evaluative, a means of doing research on teaching and writing in our program and then using the findings to discuss the variety of practices and values that were present.
However, we still had to report out using the required form. The process we developed for the assessment had elements we could embrace: it helped us to foster deep, informed discussions among a portion of the writing faculty about what we value in writing, and it gave us the opportunity to collect, describe, and discuss the types of writing students were doing across the program. Nevertheless, the broader administrative process at the institution — how it solicited, circulated, and sought to use scores — remained unchanged and was philosophically incongruous with the view of writing education we sought to promote within the program. Regardless of how we performed the assessment, the administrative process converted the labor of teachers and students — which we qualitatively described and discussed in the local assessment — into flattened signifiers, a set of singular numbers that related to simply stated outcomes.
Below is the required set of numbers solicited within the process: an overall score accompanied by scores in five categories that aligned with the stated learning outcomes of the writing program. These numbers were obtained from a statistically significant sample of students' writing.
This representation was produced by the reporting requirements and circulated as a true and objective portrait of student learning in the first-year writing program. The representation, and the circumscribed method through which it was reported, depicts a program in which there is agreement on what good writing looks like; it has been measured competently, and the program is functioning adequately. Proficiency in this assessment was designated as 2.5, so we seemed to be doing better than the baseline. Administrators got an assessment that satisfied our accreditation body; there was no reason for concern and no obvious impetus for greater investment of resources.
Now I offer another set of numbers, another way of representing the writing program that originated from another set of values and another ideology of labor. As we conducted this assessment, we were also steadily arguing that the writing program was substantially underresourced. The table below presents a different portrait of the writing program at the time of the assessment.
The second table portrays a program that is likely struggling, if not in disarray. Most of its teachers are working under exploitative terms; they are not very experienced, and they are turning over at a high rate. The administrative structure involves one tenure-line faculty member. Professional development is undersupported, with no guaranteed annual allotment. There is no ethical means of compelling most instructors to participate.
The first representation was generated in response to a mandate that carefully constrained what is reported and how. The second representation was not mandated by any reporting mechanism. Indeed, even outside of the assessment there was no established requirement to compile any of these numbers, and there was no established pathway to report them. Through focusing narrowly on the assessment of students' work (which was removed from the situations of its production) according to a handful of outcomes, the first representation created an order in which the onus of action was solely on the teachers and the WPA, carrying the underlying assumption that any deficits result from inadequate job performance rather than systematic institutional neglect; the second representation eroded the credibility of the assessment numbers as an indicator of the success and adequacy of the program structure and put the onus on the institution to create the professional conditions for success.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMICS OF ASSESSMENT
I want to turn now to explain some of the political economic logics at play in large-scale writing assessments like this one, and I will start with value. Value is a noun. In its noun form, a value is a property of something that can be expressed as an abstract signifier. The categories we use to assess writing are values but so also are the symbolic markers we produce. The noun form is the expression of exchange value. Some important characteristics of the noun form of value (a value) are its abstraction, its transferability, and its transcendence of the situations of production. We can assign an essay a 3 on a five-point scale, but the essay is not the 3. In terms of the assessment, the essay is a material object with rhetorical use-value that doesn't have any exchange value in circulation, but the generic value assigned to it, the 3, does.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Economies of Writing by Bruce Horner, Brice Nordquist, Susan M. Ryan. Copyright © 2017 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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